Our team knows that even minor tooth loss, such as a single missing tooth, requires a dental prosthetic to avoid major complications down the road. To help restore these gaps in your smile, we can help you with a dental bridge. In today’s blog, your Leawood, KS, dentist talks about placing our custom dental bridges.
The Impact of a Lost Tooth
Losing natural teeth can mean major complications for the health and appearance of your smile. For example, your missing teeth could leave behind a gap that causes surrounding teeth to rift with time, resulting in misalignment that changes smile beauty and leaves teeth and gums vulnerable to decay and disease. The changes in bite balance could leave your smile vulnerable to TMJ disorder and bruxism (teeth grinding). You could also simply feel embarrassed about your appearance due to the gap in your smile, which impacts your social life. But with a dental bridge, our team can offer a solution to minor tooth loss, one that looks natural.
Planning Treatment and Designing Your Prosthetic
To begin, our team will carefully examine your smile with advanced digital technology, so we can understand the cause and severity of your oral health concerns. We want to treat underlying issues to keep your bridge safe and prevent further tooth loss. We then numb the teeth on each side of the gap, known as abutment teeth, to make room for the crowns that support the new teeth. We next take detailed images and impressions, which we use to design and fabricate the final product.
Securing New Smiles
The bridge itself will be made from ceramic, which is a lifelike material we can shade to blend with your smile. This can also absorb daily bite forces too! This will contain new teeth with crowns on each side. We connect the crowns to the abutment teeth to secure the new ones firmly in place. They can stay in place for between 10 and 15 years on average. To keep them strong and bright, be sure you brush and floss them as you would natural teeth, and also clean the spaces between the top of your gums and the bottom of your prosthetic.
If you have any questions about how we replace between one and three missing teeth in a row with a dental bridge, or if you have gaps in your smile that need attention, then please reach out to our team today to learn more about our custom and lifelike dental prosthetics.
Ready for a Custom Prosthetic?
We want to help you enjoy a full smile again with a custom dental prosthetic. Call Dreem Dentistry in Leawood, KS by calling (913)681-5500 to learn more about our replacement teeth.
